Tuesday, September 1, 2015

I have reached that age in life when friends are thinking very seriously about getting married. A few are already married and it is becoming difficult to treat them as exceptions. Every couple of months a friend calls and tells me how she is engaged and while I am elated for her, I hate that question - so when do you think you'll get married ? I always answer this with the incredulity this question deserves alongwith a general level of excitement for her impending nuptials. After the same debate about how marriage is all about companionship my friends ultimately tell me - when you meet the right person of course you will change your mind. If they are close friends they know that this is something I don't really do. I don't meet anyone let alone actually know enough men romantically to categorize them as 'right' and 'wrong'.

I have a general inability to perform or even exist in the romantic sphere. It is not that in some dimension I don't want to, it's just that I was never any good at it and I don't meet anyone I like. Any man whom I genuinely like I immediately relegate to that sphere of asexuality which exists I think only in my head. I stopped even thinking about this but recently the pointed questions have made me feel as though I am a little abnormal in my behavior.

I want to believe that one day I will want love. For the longest time I labelled this period as the time when I would magically drop half my body weight and then tada! I would be in the market for love. Of course this has also undergone transformation. I have seen girls bigger than me who are very adept at loving and being loved. I am grown up enough to realize that those who can love do love no matter what their body size, course load or career opportunities may be.

I have thought a lot about this, in bits and pieces over the years. It has been so long since I even liked someone. To just see a man and want him would be a welcome change right now. I must be crazy but I would really be glad with even a tale of unrequited love in my life right now. It would at least add a newer dimension to my complete failure to launch in this unexplored realm.

I see love as a very simple thing - loving someone is when you want to try. When you love someone enough you want to try to make it work. You want to to try to compromise and you don't give up. It is like another exam. Love is not sex (though from what I have heard it sounds amazing) but it is liking someone enough that you change routines for this person. You want to find a way to be a part of this person's life even if it means slightly altering yours. It means fighting to find a middle path.

I want to believe that someday the urge to love someone romantically will just naturally pop up in my subconscious. I believe that I won't mind being an unrequited lover that day if only I could bring myself to care. How am I ever supposed to write anything if I don't experience heart break and pain ?

Knowing myself a little bit now, I think I am going to skip this dimension altogether. Someone will have to be truly adorable and very hell bent on loving me for me to decide to even think about this entire mess. Till then I will sit this one out. I am quite willing to be an immovable object on which a force of extreme magnitude must act.

I would make a great aunt anyway. I can be your spinster friend who looks after your kids in her spare time. If I can't be good at everything and can't have everything I am glad that the one thing I miss is romantic love. It seems pretty unimportant to me till now.